Unconditional Love

Who are you?
Who, who, who, who?
Who are you?
Who, who, who, who?
Who are you?
Who, who, who, who?
Who are you?
Who, who, who, who?

In their classic song, The Who ask an essential question for all of us.  In the early days of Jesus’ earthly ministry, John the Baptist is careful to distinguish himself from Jesus, making it clear who he, John, was, and who he was not.  He proclaimed,

The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

We, too, have to answer the question of who we are — as individuals, as companies, as groups of friends, as faith communities — before we can do anything else. Otherwise, our decision making process has no foundation, is bereft of guidance. We must know who we are — our values, our beliefs, what matters to us, what doesn’t matter to us, what inspires us, what repulses us.  Jesus found out exactly who he was at his baptism:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ―You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.

We find the answer to this crucial question at our baptism, too. We find out who we are.  Jesus is God’s beloved son, in whom God is well pleased.  We, too, are God’s beloved children, God’s beloved daughters and sons, with whom God is well pleased.  Out of that certainty come our decisions about how we act, what we do, what we don’t do, what we think, what we value and what we abhor.

So, who are we? Who is God? To know one, we have to know the Other.  We know that God is unconditional love, and that Jesus came to show us what unconditional love looks like. God is well pleased with God’s beloved Son because Jesus always acted from the instinct to show unconditional love, he lived and moved and had his being in the swirling pulse of agape, the Greek word meaning unconditional love.  God loves us always, no matter what; that, after all, is the nature of unconditional love.

But is God always well pleased with us? It’s hard to imagine that that is the case, especially at those times when we don’t show unconditional love to others.  I have shared with you in earlier meditations various adventures and misadventures our family has experienced with our cat, Socks.  We had to let her move on to the Peaceable Kingdom a few weeks ago; she was over 20 ½ years old – she would have been 21 in April.  Letting her go was the merciful thing to do – we know that. But, oh, do we miss her presence among us.

My younger son and I were on the phone talking about it, and as I cried and cried, I kept asking him, “Why does it have to be so hard?  Why is it always so hard?  Later, I realized it’s so heartbreaking because what we experience with our animal friends is unconditional love. They love us no matter what. We can accidentally step on their tails, tell them we’re too busy to take them on a walk or get home a bit late to feed them.  Even through all of this, they love us still. No grudges. No ill will.  And because we don’t experience that consistently in our lives from each other, it’s very hard when our animal friends die. We know that we won’t be receiving that love in the flesh or the fur every day.  But with Kitty, I’ve come to see that her spirit lives on, that I still receive her unconditional love. That her spirit is free to roam and move, to swoop and sway, to surround me and fill me and keep me company.

And that, too, is the nature of unconditional love. The love that Jesus has for us, shows us. The love that lives beyond death.  With God’s help, we, too, can live in that generosity of spirit called unconditional love. We can forgive; we can release grudges; we can approach others with tolerance, compassion, patience and graciousness. We can, with God, live from a place of largesse.  And every time we do that, we realize once again who we are:  We are recipients of God’s unconditional love, the containers of it, the living representations of it.  We are those with whom God is well pleased.  And we are, indeed, God’s beloved.

Photography by Nathaniel Elberfeld, November 2017